Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  The two trunks pulled back. A voice issued from the spear Montrose held in hand. “We are the Authority.”

  2. Mimicry Predator

  A.D. 164,522 TO A.D. 165,326

  “You are M3?”

  “Yes. What you see before you is a heraldic symbol, a memory of one of our extinct contributory races. It is a plenipotentiary of M3 designed to treat with you.”

  “You speak English?”

  “As a courtesy to you.”

  Montrose looked down. “I can see the stars in the cluster moving.”

  “It requires thirty earthyears for a signal to cross the diameter of our primary housing. You have attracted the attention of our constituent Dominions. Your time-sense has been slowed as a courtesy to me.”

  “I’ve been trying to get to speak with you for a long time.”

  “First, we must establish a preliminary matter.”

  “Ask away.”

  “We understand your psychology is based on a heterosexual physiognomy unusual even in the Orion Arm. The human drive to reproduce requires individuals to enter into a covenant and mutual intercourse with at least one of the other half of your oddly bifurcated species, who, equipped with different organs, glands, hormones, parasympathetic and nervous reactions, and neurochemistry, must of necessity have a complementary but unfamiliar reproductive strategy and communication tactics. Only a ferocious drive for unification with the other half of your sexual dyad could overcome this divergence between the sexes. We have seen you harness this powerful drive and divert it to various warlike efforts on behalf of our constituents. Also, your sexual reproduction necessitates communication with a sex alien to your own. Hence, you live by words and by war. Is this correct?”

  “Correct. That seems like a fair summation of the human race.”

  “We were speaking of you personally.”

  Montrose squinted at the ophiuroid, wondering.

  The creature said, “We assume from this that you also understand the concept of courtesy. We note with that you gave proper notice to your murder victims among my constituent subsystems. This is not the action of a solitary mimicry predator. Your race is a cursorial-hunting pack predator and endurance hunter. You, therefore, are as courteous a people as we are.”

  “Are you? I recollect how I weren’t treated so great on my arrival here, a thousand years past, come next Wednesday.”

  “Distributive courtesy is a particular communication-sharing strategy that operates in hierarchic systems, like the hunting packs, tribes, kingdoms, and derivative legal arrangements of your species. It acts before the fact. Ours is a commutative courtesy. It acts after the fact. This living form you see is an idealized image of one of our primary constituent species—that one high and eldest race of M3 which rose to dominate and influence all others found here or imported later.

  “The star under which they were born has long since been collapsed into a neutron star, all biological life replaced and reengineered, and the worlds of that system fed into an accretion disk established as a convenience for interstellar engineering works.

  “But on that mother-world, intelligence was a communicable disease, not a trait passed through inheritance. There, life was not housed in rigid macroscopic organisms, as with you, but was fluid, allowing for the easy exchange of organs and liquids and living materials. The high race did not have inherited characteristics passed to our young, as your race does, but reproduced by the fissiparity of selected organs, who recombine via parasitism and commensality.”

  Peering more closely, Montrose now saw along the underside of the creature’s leg hundreds of boneless growths and slugs of unknown kingdoms, lithotrophs and organotrophs that formed neither plant nor animal, tendrils and bags and pulsing shapes intertwined in a network of thorns and arteries. Each vein was tipped with a clamp or needle clutching or penetrating one or several victims, who was penetrating others in turn. It was a labyrinth of parasites upon parasites that formed one ever-changing neural and circulatory system.

  As best he could tell, there were no species. None looked remotely like its neighbor. Everything was impromptu, jury-rigged. All the organisms were made up of mixed and mismatched organs forced into supraorganic combinations.

  The major overall structures, such as the muscles and armor of the arms and the channels of the scenting tubes, seemed a well-disciplined cooperative venture, more like the roads and sewers in a town than the centralized circulatory or sensory systems of any earthlike organism.

  The creature must have somehow noticed his attention. Hundreds of tiny hoses or nostrils lifted out of the main breathing channel of the trunk running down the leg, and turned toward him, making tiny whistling noises as the collective beasts and beast-parts scented him.

  The strange voice from his spear was still speaking. “It was the practice of all predators and scavengers of our home world not to consume a prey animal entirely but to recover its organs and developments intact and attach them to one’s own control hierarchy. This required physical contact between predator and prey neural elements, which, in turn, was a plague vector. A particular brain parasite causes an overgrowth of complex surfaces in the neural notochords of various organisms; any creature so afflicted develops primitive selfawareness. Do you understand the forces that shaped our ancestral imperatives?”

  “I think I understand.” Montrose wondered what kind of civilization would arise on a world where there was one intelligent wolf among his unintelligent pack, able to speak to the one intelligent sheep among an unintelligent flock, talking to intelligent vultures, elephants, rats, giraffes, each one alone in its race. The image was disorienting. He said, “On my planet, predators just eat prey.”

  “The terms predator and prey are inexact. Master and slave are a closer parallel, or puppet and puppeteer. The intelligence virus was not confined to any organic type or particular nook in the food chain. Lithotrophs, organotrophs, and autotrophs were all uplifted randomly into selfawareness, and many perished for lack of education. You understand our need for courtesy; only by the cooperation between deadly enemies could we spread the brain disease of intelligence to other organisms we found useful.”

  Montrose now understood why the shipmind had not been designed with any safety protocol to protect any mind stored in it. Once Twinklewink was gone, the ship reverted to its base settings and habits. Those were based on the high race of M3, a civilization whose members reproduced by a kind of neural infection. When it possessed and consumed the ghost of Montrose, the shipmind never had any concept that it was violating anyone’s privacy or individuality, because, to it, those two ideas were literally unthinkable.

  “Also, I was kidnapped when I came here and was reduced to a slave. Not to mention brain-raped, brain-looted, and tortured.”

  “This is according to our proper laws and customs, which spring out of our racial psychology as mimicry predators. We would have treated our own children returning from far missions the same.”

  “You also haven’t offered me a seat or a drink, here in your, ah, throne room.”

  “Throne rooms are a convenience of architectural communication needed to symbolize dominance in a pack hierarchy, such as your race utilizes. The highest ranked of the high race of M3 display our dominance by the stealth and indirectness of our approach. We are standing on the inner shell of the megastellar energy structure itself, lightyears distant from any living beings, utterly beyond hope of detection. You may recline on the surface in the vector direction of the current gravity, called down.”

  “So, no drink, eh?”

  “No drink. The body you wear allows you to manufacture alcohol directly in your bloodstream at will.”

  “But you also said you were a courteous people.”

  “Of necessity. Once our slaves prove themselves to be more useful when solitary than when communal, we must manumit them, release them to indentured service, and we make amends.”

  “So you will make amends to me?”

  “Yes.”<
br />
  “I am in love with Rania. The real one. She was here. I want you to help me find her.”

  “We shall help you find her.”

  “Is she still here?”

  “No.”

  He had expected this answer. Only the most absurd hope ever held out any other possibility. But expecting a baseball bat to the face did not soften the blow when it fell.

  The ophiuroid said, “No copy of her mental information, no record of her internal qualities, remains among us in any archive whatsoever. Long ago, it was deemed imprudent to leave a copy of one’s mental information and selfawareness behind in any system to which one transmitted oneself: a method of accelerating massless particles used to house the records to lightspeed was derived to avoid this imprudence. She is gone. She departed with her husband.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “Is the word incorrect? Her avowed sexual partner.”

  The sensation of a baseball bat to the face was not any more pleasant when it came from an unexpected direction, without warning. He found that he was shouting without realizing it. “It’s a lie! That’s a damned lie!”

  “Ximen del Azarchel explained to us that, by your laws and customs, a widow is permitted to take a second mate. A widow is a female whose male mate dies.”

  “I am that male mate. I am not dead.”

  “That being so, Ximen del Azarchel unwittingly acted in contravention of your laws and customs. This was a discourtesy for which he must make amends. You must kill him.”

  “I was planning to. But pestilence! Am I deaf? Did you just say I should kill him?”

  “You are not deaf; we say you must kill Ximen del Azarchel. Our two races, O human man, are both predators, and therefore not as dissimilar in psychology as you might expect: Ximen del Azarchel unwittingly committed a discourtesy which prevented your reproductive strategy. Life must serve life.”

  Montrose felt some of the anger draining from him. “Damn. You are hard cases, ain’t you?”

  “We are hard cases. Were it ours to do, we would disguise ourselves into the environs and set a trap to take Ximen del Azarchel by ambuscade. You must give him fair warning before the killing. In that regard, mimicry predators and cursorial predators are not alike. We are patient in ambush. You are patient in pursuit.”

  “But you say it was unwitting? He thought I was dead?”

  “We say it was unwitting. He thinks you dead. We examined the contents of his brain as precisely and painstakingly as we have yours. There is was no deception in him at that time; all his memory chains showed the destruction of the starship we designed and gave the incomplete Rania. It is possible he erased out of his own mind all memory of any fact that cast the slightest doubt on the certainty of your death, but unlikely. We were surprised long-range instruments detected that the wreck still had life aboard. It was for your benefit that our agents within the Orion Arm prematurely triggered the supernova we had been carefully nurturing at VY Canis Majoris.”

  “Wait—the Cataclysms said they deduced I had a fairy godmother, a puppeteer who was helping me. That was you?”

  “In part. There are greater things afoot, here and elsewhere, of which we know nothing. Each life only performs the task before it. We are helping the whole human race, yes, and also helping the other likely candidate races within the Orion Arm.”

  “Candidates for what?”

  “Sovereignty.”

  “And this help? It includes things as subtle as somehow tricking our astronomers into calling M44 the Beehive Cluster just to freak out the bee creatures living there, on the off chance that I would come along and mention that? How in the world could anyone arrange that coincidence over so many eons and lightyears?”

  “That was done by agents left over by our predecessors, whose actions I cannot understand. How it was done, we cannot speculate. At their height, the Panspermians, who were the Archon of Orion, controlled an intellectual topology in excess of ten quintillion, one order of magnitude above our own.”

  “Why are you helping the human race?”

  “Out of courtesy.”

  “Courtesy to us?”

  “No. This is a courtesy owed to the many noble and extinct races of the Panspermians, who long ago settled small and rocky worlds of small and yellow stars with the primordial elements and matrices. From these, you, the Praesepe races, the Hyades races, and your many brother races in Orion Arm, arose. Surely you noticed the oddity that all the races you have so far encountered were descended from ultralow-temperature planetary-surface species made of flesh and blood at the molecular scale of being?”

  “No, I weren’t paying much attention.”

  “Such creatures are a minority. Small planets and stars were overlooked as resources by the Forerunners who came before, the Colloquium and the Magisterium. The Panspermians established a cliometric pathway for evolution, which promised a swift and peaceful unification of the Milky Way into a single mental system. This cliometric path was derailed for many ages due to malign interference; and the selfless cause of sophotransmogrification foundered in Orion, civilizations fell, Potentates and Powers slept, and worlds lay fallow. We, the Authority called Absolute Extension, have vowed ourselves solemnly to restore galactic evolution to its proper course, educate and elevate the race destined to replace us … and then perish.”

  3. The Indifferent Universe

  A.D. 165,326 TO A.D. 165,446

  An odd feeling, lonely and empty as a dry wind walking through a ghost town, whispered through Montrose.

  He looked at the looming shape of a long-extinct biological ancestor of the machine races of M3, and his eyes fell to the transparent deck and took in the magnificence of the galaxy seen so far below, the colorful nebulae, richly ornamented arms, its delicate circle of star clusters and satellite galaxies.

  His gaze rested on the satellite galaxies, the Lesser and Greater Magellanic Clouds, and the dwarf galaxies in Sculptor and Fornax, the five dwarf galaxies in Leo, the spheroid dwarfs in Carina and Sextans; the ancient dwarf galaxy Canes Venatici I and small, faint Canes Venatici II, close and bright from this position, and a dozen others. Most were farther from the galactic core than the tiny spray of stars called M3.

  And this was just the immediate neighborhood of the Milky Way.

  Perhaps by some courtesy of M3, as his eyes roved farther, they grew stronger, and resolved distant smears of light into clarity.

  Surrounding vast Andromeda were another eighteen satellite galaxies. The Triangulum Galaxy of M33 was roughly halfway between Andromeda and the Milky Way. NGC 3109, with its companions Sextans A and the Antlia Dwarf, was far away, but still orbiting the barycenter of the Local Group, as were IC 1613, Phoenix Dwarf, Leo A, Pegasus Dwarf Irregular, Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, and seven others who cleaved neither to Andromeda nor to the Milky Way.

  All these together were nothing more than the galactic Local Group, which in turn was the smallest arm of the Laniakea Supercluster, whose main branch was the Virgo Cluster. The Local Group was a group, because it was fewer than fifty active galaxies; the Virgo Cluster was a cluster, as it contained two thousand.

  One hundred galaxy groups and galaxy clusters were located within the one hundred million lightyears’ reach of the Laniakea Supercluster, all streaming toward an unseen gravitational anomaly in the midst of the Virgo Cluster, tens of thousands of times greater in mass than the Milky Way, called the Great Attractor.

  The Laniakea Supercluster consisted of the Virgo Supercluster (which held the Local Group and the Virgo Cluster); the Hydra Supercluster; the Centaurus Supercluster; the Pavo-Indus Supercluster; and an unnamed southern supercluster consisting of the Fornax Cluster and the Dorado and Eridanus Clouds.

  The whole Laniakea Supercluster was shaped like a tree of blazing fire, with each great wall or filament structure of its five constituent superclusters like the spreading branches.

  The unimaginable nothingness between the branches were the Great Voids, inexplicable regions where no clo
uds nor clusters sailed and no galaxy strayed, no stars burned: the Capricornus Void, the Sculptor Void, the Canis Major Void.

  Or perhaps it looked like a multipronged lightning bolt, reaching across billions of years rather than a split second, issuing not from a cloud but from the primordial nebulae of the Big Bang.

  Yet even this was but one lightning bolt in the storm of the cosmos. For Laniakea was merely one of half a score of nearby superclusters within five hundred million lightyears. There were distant ones. The massive Horologium Supercluster beyond Achernar in the south reached an incomprehensible seven hundred million lightyears away at its closest point to over nine hundred million. The even more massive Corona Borealis Supercluster was one billion lightyears beyond Alphecca, to the north of the universe.

  And there was a score of superclusters farther than this, in the remote distance, reaching ten billion lightyears away—and all this covered less than five percent of the observable universe.

  So then: the Local Group was the smallest of the six clusters in the Laniakea Supercluster, and in the Local Group, the Milky Way was the second smallest galaxy. The Orion Spur was the smallest arm, running from the Orion Nebula to the Rosette Nebula, merely a linking tissue bridging the much larger Sagittarius Arm and Perseus Arm.

  Each arm, star cluster, star cloud, and satellite galaxy held countless suns and worlds, barren perhaps, perhaps bursting with life, and living beings whose past and fate and purpose, each rich and meaningful to itself, neither Montrose nor M3 would ever know.

  If the Authority of M3 was doomed to die, in the face of such appalling, unimaginable emptiness, such immeasurable desolation, what did it matter?

  What did anything matter, love or loss, revenge or forgiveness, self or self-sacrifice?

  Montrose closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, telling himself to stay shallow, think only of his all-consuming madness, his hopeless goal, and leave the despair of reality to folk less able to fool themselves than he.

  He opened his eyes again. “Why must you die, M3? Not that I will miss you. You are a hard-case bastard.”